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1st Touch 360 Customer Portal Helps Drive Business Transformation at New Charter Group

Submitted by Editor on 22nd August 2016

A 360° Tenant Portal system from leading social housing technology innovator 1st Touch is enabling New Charter Group, one of the North West’s largest housing providers to transform its mobile workforce processes and customer support strategy.

The new system delivers a single-view of all key data both for field operatives through their handheld devices and to tenants through an online portal based customer hub.

New Charter Group is a social landlord based in Tameside, Greater Manchester with 19,500 homes in Tameside, Oldham and Nottingham and a turnover of £100 million. In seeking to optimise both efficiency and customer service levels, the Group recently undertook a review of their IT estate focusing on people, processes and technology. Amongst the areas of investment were mobile workforce systems and online customer self-service.

The required system needed to be an automated digital solution that placed customers at its heart, empowering them where possible to self-help through a self-service functionality, allowing them to make payments, request repairs, report anti-social behavior and carry out a host of other useful tasks. It also needed to be ‘right first time’ and ultimately be enterprise wide; allowing all staff, field workers and management to have a single-view of all key data, when visiting customers.

New Charter Group chose 1st Touch’s widely acclaimed 360° Tenant Portal as it had class-leading usability for both field operatives and customers. It also incorporates a revolutionary Automatic Appointments system called iAppoint. This is a doorstep appointments system, which simplifies appointment scheduling through enabling live tenant interaction. This empowers tenants to schedule their own confirmed appointments with multiple departments, either online 24/7 via the customer hub or through field operatives using their handheld devices whilst visiting.

“Once we have fully rolled 1st Touch out, colleagues will have the digital ‘single-view’ technology they need to provide the best possible customer experience wherever they are. Our customers will have easy 24/7 digital access to our services through our new online customer hub, thereby reducing ‘transactional’ demand. There are also benefits for us as an organisation, as our Customer Insight and Business Intelligence will now drive our decision-making and actions. The combined result will be a significant boost in both efficiency and customer service levels. All in all, 1st Touch has delivered the system we required and we look forward to enjoying the potentially huge rewards that this exciting new solution offers.”

For his part 1st Touch CEO Greg Johns welcomed Yvonne’s comments adding, “You cannot fail to be impressed by the professionalism of New Charter Group’s change strategy or the scale of the investment they have made in transforming mobile working and customer access to services. Nor can one underestimate the positive impact that this level of automation will have on their customers. The fact that customers can now resolve their own issues online through the customer hub, or have them automated by front line staff using their handhelds, is a major step forwards. The immediacy and thoroughness of this type of automation will be incredibly well received by customers and operationally this can certainly be held up as an excellent example of best-practice.”